A large and fully aquatic animal, prone to extreme highs and lows, often known as the sea cow.

Monthly Archives: March 2014

Bought razor blades. Bought michalki biale. Ate as many as I could stomach on the way home.

Was so angry I was shaking. Smoked 3 cigarettes (2.5). Job interview in the morning. Fuck off (try and type no and autocorrect selects fuck off – telling, eh?). Not going to cut. Self harmed twice in the past couple of months, once badly and once not so badly. Got scars on the top of my left thigh.

Want it all to stop. Not going to cut. The sweets and the walk home have kept me going. Gonna watch The Wire and go to bed.

Talked today with a woman I work with. She suffers from bipolar I and has been hospitalised due to manic periods. We compared experiences – she’s very visual and talked about the clarity with which she saw an orange, in all it’s detail and completeness. I talked about the heady and joyous sensations I get from music and language which can become overpowering. We seemed to agree that it varies between hyper- and hypo- sensitivity to the world around us, our emotions being big and strong (good as well as bad) and our coping mechanisms occasionally leaving something to be desired. We laughed a lot and it was a really lovely experience. She kept a positive spin on things and highlighted our creativity and empathy, while also sharing her fears of drug dependency and need for balance. She talked about the triad of drive, threat and soothing systems that we need to keep in check, we shared our family histories and saw how they were similar and made sense. It was really good.

I have words and energy, my jokes are getting spikier and I’m moving more. I’m tired from poor sleep but still feel good. I feel horribly and self-consciously overweight at the minute (I weigh around 11.15 stone/76kg) but also ok. Onwards.

I woke up late, in part due to the clocks going forward. I ate bread and jam, watched an episode of The Wire and then I exercised for 30 minutes. At the end I felt a buzz of endorphins and tried to tap into the ground. I tried to focus on my body and its sensations, the music I was listening to. When I couldn’t do it immediately, my thoughts whizzing and skipping from one body part to the next, I got frustrated. Then I cried. I cried and cried like a baby. I couldn’t think why I was crying other than it hurt.

Everything just hurts.

Then I calmed down and tried to focus. I put my hands on my stomach and breathed. I let the thoughts slosh, gentler this time, and tried to inhale the music. Then I cried again. I lay back and sobbed cleansing, gutteral sobs. I wept.

I tried to pinpoint why I was crying. Again, it just hurt. There’s so much pain that I carry around inside me. I calmed down and went for a shower. In there I cried again.

All the time I was thinking about what hurt. I thought about relationships and love and rejection.

I found out yesterday that when I was a baby my mum had a bad time. I’d always suspected she’d been depressed but it was more complicated than that. When I was about six weeks old, my brother came home with the flu and passed it on to us. We both got really, really sick and I lost weight. When my mum went to the midwives they were so horrible that they made her cry, to the point where they phoned her the next day to check on her. My mum being my mum she made out like everything was ok and that was it. Nobody came to check on her. My dad was working away a lot, she had two other kids to look after and me failing to thrive with absolutely zero support. She said she lost all her confidence. She’d already been thrown by having a girl (“they assumed I’d know what to do but I didn’t, all the bits are different”) and she had a really shitty time. Because I lost weight and didn’t sleep she gave me cocoa when I got older, starting the whole caffeine palaver, and I never slept. For four years I didn’t sleep and screamed and cried. I think it hurt us both. I felt so sad when she told me. She couldn’t enjoy me, even though she loved me to bits, and the family joke is that I was an awful baby that nobody really liked. She said I was beautiful though.

But on the floor and in the shower I was thinking about the love I’ve sought since then. The first boy I really, really loved was so horrible to me. He’d abandon me and be cruel when we were young. As we got older he got into some dark shit and developed a drug problem. Then, when he came out the other side, I wasn’t worth getting his shit together for. I would’ve happily spent the rest of my life with him. I got sick of feeling like it was my fault for going to college and uni, trying to better myself, when really it’s his fault for not coming with me. That hurt.

The next boy I really loved also didn’t think I was worth doing anything about. It was long distance but I went to see him a lot. I went up whenever I could. He only came to see me once. Both these guys didn’t have a great deal of money, that’s fine, but I wanted to feel like I was worth trying a bit harder for.

In between there were some guys who did some very nasty things. I was vulnerable, young and stupid so some opportunistic bastards moved in and abused me. The apathy of the ones I really loved hurt far more than what they did to me.

I think these rejections all connect to that first, primal rejection. It’s not that one hurts more than the other but when you start at the surface you pull up a vine of all these connected hurts until you go back to that sad little baby who just wants to feel safe. And that’s why I was on the floor, crying like that baby.

When I was on mushrooms I cried like a baby because I loved my mum. It was also my birthday, which I was also very emotional about, but really I just wanted to tell my mum how much I loved her but I couldn’t because then she’d know I was on mushrooms. Hallucinogens allowed me to relax into love and to feel that pure, unadulterated joy of love without hurt. I felt something similar today when I lay on the floor and cried. It was that same pure cry because I feel things.

It feels ridiculous. I’ve been desperate to get married and have a baby for a long time. I think it’s because what I really want is that uncomplicated relationship that I imagine with the baby, that I would love it and it would love me. I want to feel that love between me and another human. I have to remind myself that it’ll never be that simple.

The last boy I loved no longer made me feel safe. When I told him I was scared of him or he made me sad he didn’t listen. I couldn’t trust him anymore. Maybe it’s because I’d already cut him so deeply with things that I’d done. We didn’t trust each other anymore. On acid, I’d looked at him and just loved him for him. I saw him age and I didn’t care. But I still felt disconnected. He wanted to be with me so much and really put in the effort, he was always there. I wonder if I fucked up something that was meant to be but it’s over. I rejected him. Maybe he put in just the right of effort to make me cocky. We were no longer equals and we were marred by mistrust.

Now I don’t really know where I’m at. I’m in a hinterland of nothingness. I am waiting for a bit of effort and something worth making the effort for.

They are all just men. They are all just humans with their own psychodrama. We all just play out our own story on one another. That’s why I keep my hurt inside sometimes. But I shouldn’t because I matter just as much as they do. I’m not being unreasonable when I ask to be loved properly. I don’t know what the answer is. It just really, really hurts.